It is impossible to write a review of
Mafia without comparing it to the Grand Theft Auto Series. Just so you know. Like GTA, it is in essence a third-person shooter and you also drive a lot. Your character, Tommy Angelo, is a member of the Mafia and you get to do a lot of violent stuff. There is a great variety of weapons and cars at your disposable. There is a vast world to explore, and there are cops to keep you in line.
This game is no way a GTA clone though. It had the potential to be so much more. The basic premise of the game is better. You are a gangster who wants to "sell out" to the cops in exchange for you and your family's safety. You end up telling the detective your entire story with the mafia. Tommy is a much more believable player than the bad-as s Tommy Vercetti. He was just a taxi driver, struggling to get by. One day, he witnesses an exciting
40 mph car chase when one car breaks down. The guys tumble out of the car, see you hanging out by your cab, and force you to drive them back to HQ. You do it and you are offered a job with Salieri's mob. Now Tommy doesn't immediately accept the offer. He doesn't want to get mixed up with these guys. However, one day he finds his cab getting wrecked by a rival gang who think that he's allied with Salieri. So Tommy shows up to Salieri's for protection. A much more plausible and probably realistic story of how people get involved in crime.
Throughout the game, at times, you see Tommy struggle with new life. In one hand, he's one of the most respected members of Salieri's gang, on the other hand , he struggles with the violence. He gets involved with the bartender's daughter, Sara, but doesn't pursue her further because he doesn't want to endanger her. So he takes to drinking.
In a good
story, characters cannot be simply characterized as "good" or "bad". Take Mr. Salieri himself, for example. He's a mob head, so he's a bad guy, right? Well, there's this one car race, and the entire mob and half the neighborhood has their bets on this one racer, someone Salieri has supported his whole career. But there's rumors of this other guy with some fancy car from Europe. Now, you'd expect him to order Tommy to kill the driver, steal the car, or destroy the car, right? But in this mission, aptly titled "Fair Play", you go to steal the car, bring it to a garage so your mechanics can take a look at it and bring it back. Salieri wants to win this race fairly.
Sure, he kills people who betray him. But at the funeral, allies and enemies alike reminisce over good times with the guy. Mafia rules. Then he offers to support the widow and their children. This game goes much deeper into what is good or bad than the GTA series does. If a guy tries to rape your girl and you kill him, is that somehow less bad than a random murder? You'll see Tommy let people go that he's supposed to kill. He is pretty much a good person stuck in a really bad situation.
I really loved the cutscenes and the story of this game. While I would hesitate to call this game "deep", it's a much more thoughtful game than GTA, and offers a more frank (I suppose...I've never been in a gang before so I don't know) look into organized crime. Not all gangsters are bloodthirsty savages, and some killers are more evil than others.
The game probably serves more to discourage gang life, while GTA glorifies it. Mafia tries real hard to be as sleazy as GTA (there's a picture of a naked girl in the start up menu and there's a mission where you blow up a wh-rehouse), but somehow, I didn't get that feeling from it.
So enough of that. I liked the 1930's realism to the game except for one thing. Cars. I don't know about you, but
40 mph car chases don't excite me much. Okay, further in the game you can get cars that can go 80+, but the speed limit throughout the city (which is dumb. The speed limit for the bridge is the same as the speed limit for the tiny residential roads) is 40 mph, and yes the cops enforce that. It's a cop system similar to GTA, where a symbol of either a fine (they will fine you if they catch you), handcuffs (they will arrest you), or a pistol (they will shoot to kill) appears. If you outrun the cops, the symbol fades and disappears. Also you can get a Wanted level, which is a bar, and if you outrun them, the bar will slowly get smaller.
First of all, because the cars are so slow and handle like crap, it's not the easiest thing to outrun the cops. And the
cop AI is annoying. I mean first of all, the Don tells you the Mafia pays off the cops but they will chase you for going 40+ mph, running red lights, hitting street signs, crashing into other cars, as well as the usual violence, running over pedestrians, gunshots, etc. It might be more realistic, but it's really annoying to follow all these rules. Sometimes getting to a mission gets extremely frustrating. You'll have a car that tops out at 50 mph, which is too slow to outrun the cops, but if you want to get somewhere, you'd rather drive 50 than 40, right? So you'll drive at 50, try to slow down when you see a cop, but invariably you'll do
something wrong and the cops will be on ya. In short, driving to missions is more of a chore than anything else, and it's hard to get to the mission without getting a ticket, getting caught by the cops, or taking damage (car crashes damage your health). And this one racing mission in the game is incredibly frustrating. Your race car can go 100+ mph but handling is incredibly horrid, and you'll spin out a lot. To make things worse, the course is 5 excruciating laps. I'm not kidding, it must have taken me 50 tries to beat it.
Speaking of cars, if you check out the specs for them, if you check out the 2-door and 4-door models of the same car, you'll see they have the same exact weight and top speed. It's a small gripe, but still...
Graphics are sketchy. Wheels look terrible, and when the policeman writes you a fine and hands it to you, you can't see it! So it looks like the cop is handing this nothing to Tommy. That's just laziness on the part of the developers. Faces usually look pretty good and weapons look good. This game is dated now, so you wouldn't be expecting incredible graphics anyway. Animations are pretty sketchy. The baseball bat swinging animation looks downright awkward anif you look, you'll see that only one hand is actually touching the bat. Smoking also looks incredibly bad in video games and Mafia is no exception.
Sound on the other hand is pretty good. Voice acting isn't too bad, and the game is full of music from the 1930's I suppose. I was particulary impressed when I drove into Chinatown; a barbershop song about Chinatown started playing. Nice, and pretty realistic to its time (though I wouldn't know from first hand experience).
Gameplay is hit and miss. Missions include things like shooting a bunch of people, blowing up a wh-rehouse, escorting a girl to her apartment, infiltrating someone's house to get evidence, and an incredibly impossible racing missions. The difficulty in general is pretty hard. To put it in GTA terms, it's harder than most of the missions, but easier than those RC missions. Except for the race.
There's a variety of weapons, and I was most impressed with the Thompson. It's a submachine gun from the 1930's and I suppose it's the one you see in gangster movies. While it's probably the best gun because it's automatic, the recoil is huge. The look of the gun, the sound of its firing, and that recoil made it feel real. Much more realistic than GTA, where the other Tommy can run around with a MINIGUN. Not only can he easily carry that monstrosity, he can also shoot it with NO recoil at all. Huh.
People have commented on the radar and while the radar on the HUD is a travesty, press TAB and a more detailed map will show up. So don't worry, you'll get around just fine.
Mafia is a different game than GTA. GTA is more shoot-em-up, run-em-over fun. It has cars that can go well over a 100 mph. It has a pretty engaging story, but you play as this complete bad-as s who's scared of no one and doesn't feel any remorse when killing. The GTA 3 guy couldn't even talk.
This game strives to be more
realistic. Weapons at times are unwieldy. Cars are always unwieldy. You play as a real person who struggles with who he is and often can't bring himself to kill the person he's supposed to "liquidate". However, it's always weird because in each level you kill 2-100 people and Tommy never feels bad about that. That's just an inherent problem in the genre though.
Mafia is completely linear, more FPS-like than GTA-style. Every once in a while, you have the chance to stop by the auto shop to learn where you can steal a new car, or you can just head on home. That's it. There's no real opportunity to free roam, and there's no reward for doing so. If you spend too much time on a joyride, you will invariably show up to your mission with less than 100 health.
Mafia had the potential to be more than GTA was and will ever be, but is tangled up in its own awkwardness. It's only got one hand on the bat. Several questions can be raised about the gameplay...How come I have to hit someone with a baseball bat 7 or more times to down him? How come I just emptied two clips into that guy and he's still not dead? Why is my enemy still standing after I just shot him in the head? Cars are so realistic that you'll scream. They are slow and handle like crap. Cops are almost as frustrating in this game as they are in real life. And no, you can't go to Pay And Spray if too many are on your tail. As unrealistic as that was, it was an essential part of the gameplay in the GTA series.
Mafia has its un-fun parts and its frustratingly hard missions, and its stale dialogue, but I found myself intrigued by the storyline and Tommy's development. For a more realistic look at gang life, look for Mafia at a discount bin near you. And don't worry, it's still violent as hell.
xo,
underdawg
Graphics:B-
Sound:A
Gameplay:B
Story:A
Overall:B+
Take a look at my GTA: Vice City and my True Crime reviews. I'll warn you though, they were some of my first reviews on this site.
Vice City Review
True Crime Review
